Hear Jim’s Red Clay Diary podcast: http://redclaydiary.com/mp3/
or read his transcript below:
Way back in time, some several decades ago,
I am grabbing lunch at a nearby diner.
Suddenly I see a lone figure…and I realize that this person
is who I will someday become.
Today, it has all come true. I am now that man.
This is my entry into the Red Clay Diary from those many years ago…
TOMBSTONE MIST (A True Time Travel Tale)
An old, stooped man walks gingerly down the street holding his lunchtime book under his arm and heading for the sandwich place he’s been eating at lo these many years.
His friends now long dead but not forgotten, he dines alone and peers deeply into his book for signs of life beyond his life, for indications of what will happen once he has become a mist over a tombstone.
He eats quietly while noisy and harried fellow diners hassle over their individual lives and talk and signify among themselves.
He turns another page in the musty volume and there lies, flatly pressed and nearly ossified, a long-stemmed green four-leaf clover. A symbol stuck there many decades back by someone who had feelings thoughts aspirations and longings, a person who believed if only for a moment that luck would somehow be mummified and preserved and passed on from reader to reader as long as the book lasted as long as the clover endured.
He smiles to himself, for no one else is looking at him.
He briefly picks up the botanical artifact and sniffs it, then carefully places it back onto the page and neatly turns the next page over it, being careful not to fold or harm it.
He strolls back to his shop, a little less stooped so that nobody but he himself can tell, and he re-enters his quiet place of business and spends the afternoon dreaming of what never could have been and wondering what the young woman who had owned the book and the four-leaf clover had been like and whether she too was a mist over a tombstone awaiting contact with the mist he will become
© 2020 A.D. by Jim Reed